A Little Tour Through European Poetry

John Taylor

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412854832
• eBook ISBN: 9781351534963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This book is both a sequel to author John Taylor's earlier volume Into the Heart of European Poetry and something different. It is a sequel because this volume expands upon the base of the previous book to include many more European poets. It is different in that it is framed by stories in which the author juxtaposes his personal experiences involving European poetry or European poets as he travels through different countries where the poets have lived or worked. Taylor explores poetry from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Lithuania, Albania, Romania, Turkey, and Portugal, all of which were missing in the previous gathering, analyzes heady verse written in Galician, and presents an important poet born in the Chuvash Republic. His tour through European poetry also adds discoveries from countries whose languages he reads fluently-Italy, Germany (and German-speaking Switzerland), Greece, and France. Taylor's model is Valery Larbaud, to whom his criticism, with its liveliness and analytical clarity, is often compared. Readers will enjoy a renewed dialogue with European poetry, especially in an age when translations are rarely reviewed, present in literary journals, or studied in schools. This book, along with Into the Heart of European Poetry, motivates a dialogue by bringing foreign poetry out of the specialized confines of foreign language departments.

1

On the Strassenbahn with Klaus Merz’s Poetry

I wish I could claim that, while riding back to the hotel on the tramway from the Frankfurt Book Fair, on a very rainy day, I had first read this poem by Klaus Merz:

Since five o’clock it’s been raining

the horizon makes

no fuss

about this.

Actually a love poem

has no need of weather

Darling.

But I would be fibbing. It is true that during my three days in Frankfurt the weather was variable (and I had no umbrella), that I would take the screeching Strassenbahn (with its steamed-up windows) back and forth to the book fair, and that it was indeed there that I finally began reading and translating for my own enjoyment—and now yours, I hope—this Swiss German poet and prose writer, born in 1945, who had been on my “find list” for more than a year.

For more than a year? In the age of Internet book ordering? How can I explain this old-fashioned eccentricity except by admitting that, at least for me, some poets and writers call for treasure hunts more than immediate access, whether electronic or otherwise. Most often, as with Merz (who was first recommended to me by a British philosopher living in Germany, then by a Swiss translator, and then by a Swiss poet), writer friends tip me off to them. Most often, they are admired by their literary compatriots but have rarely been widely translated. I cannot find their books at the municipal and university libraries in the medium-sized French town where I live. This is already somewhat enticing, yet there is no urgency. I do not need to read their books this afternoon or even the day after tomorrow, but I sense that our paths must cross.

I was at the book fair for other reasons, but I knew I would have some free time. So I kept Merz’s name—and the name of his Austrian publisher, Haymon Verlag—on a slip of paper in my pocket. In the meantime, I had done some research—on the Internet! Merz was becoming increasingly well-known in German-speaking countries, and his collected writings—seven volumes in all—were beginning to appear in a splendid cloth edition. Three volumes were already available, and, as I write this, a fourth—devoted to his “feuilletons,” essays, journalistic columns, and speeches—has just been issued.

Its title, Der Mann mit der Tür oder Vom Nutzen des Unnützen, sums up the atmosphere and approach of some of his writing and notably his early verse: The Man with the Door or On the Use of Uselessness. Merz often takes interest in some unimportant thing or phenomenon—drab falling rain in the aforementioned poem provides an example—and shows how meaningful it can be in a certain human context. A love poem perhaps has no need of weather, and yet it is because the poet first perceives and ponders the falling rain that he realizes this. As an emotion ever in potential movement, love above all tries to withdraw from reality, to isolate itself from all kinds of real and metaphorical weather. And out of the bad weather and all alone, we too find ourselves, at the end of the poem, face to face with our own “darling.”

It is the first volume of Merz’s collected writings, Die Lamellen stehen offen (The Slats Stay Open), devoted to his early poetry from the years 1963–1991, that initially attracted me when I hung out for a while at the Haymon Verlag stand. As I was leafing through the book, I kept stopping at the love poems. One of these is “Warning,” which is rather similar to the poem quoted above in that the word of endearment used at the end changes the perspective. Somewhat worrisomely, the full meaning is disclosed:

Even my own

still unthought thought

you are already

beginning to read

on my forehead

Beloved

Such poems are very simple in form and diction, yet they make one consider one’s own minor joys and lurking turmoil. What else can I say? Can any other critical commentary be put forward except that of underscoring their psychological subtlety? Merz raises no rhetorical façade. He does not try to impress with lexical or syntactic brilliance; whatever formal “modernism” he has assimilated, it consists here of little more than some suppressed punctuation between lines. If he is slightly ironic, as with the word of endearment unexpectedly employed at the end of the above poem, the irony does not make us sneer or snicker, but rather meditate more sincerely—this is the paradox of the irony—on a certain feeling of amorous uneasiness from which we may also suffer. Clearly, his goal is to sketch typical human situations in a way that opens the door onto all that is left unstated, unwritten—here, uncomfortable or troubling aspects of a relationship. What strikes the reader time and again is the density of the emotional interaction that is imaginable beyond or between such lines.

Take another example, “Wish.” As the wish unfolds, Merz is perhaps implicitly describing two potential lovers whose élan toward each other is constantly thwarted by outside factors:

Perhaps

that something would open up

for us:

once.

By chance.

Forever.

Or is he referring to a couple whose relationship is belabored by something that prevents it from blossoming? In any event, in only a few words he captures that inner voice we all hear when we talk to ourselves—only to ourselves—and become more acutely aware of lingering hopes that will probably never be fulfilled. Many of Merz’s poems similarly point to, or move back up into, an inner world. The poet keeps moving upstream, as it were, toward an elementary poetic language as well, whence the perfectly appropriate deceptive simplicity of his vocabulary. He seeks out what is hidden in the recesses—mute aspirations, silent avowals—and gives a firm, if discreet, voice to them. They are revelatory of our genuine bonds to another human being. Like many of Merz’s poems, “Distances” ultimately disturbs or puzzles in a characteristically quiet way:

From eye to eye

from eye to mouth

from mouth to mouth

from mouth to hand

from hand to hand:

the untranslatable measure

of distances

takes all our measures.

Not all of Merz’s early poems are about love. Some pieces relate odd coincidences or funny juxtapositions, such as a farmer who takes his tape recorder out into his field during a drought and plays Händel’s “Water Music.” Another poem depicts an echo as coming back “snow-covered” to a man crying out in a wintry wood. Should the poet have added something specific about the man’s solitude? If so, what? The imagery suffices unto itself. Still other, slightly longer, poems evoke moments of attentiveness in which the narrator suddenly realizes that apparently unconnected phenomena are in fact building into a significant configuration. Daily life often provides the setting, but the final meaning is not necessarily forthcoming. One of these poems is “Modest Daily Chores”:

Wasps and old hags

are in the air.

My neighbor

fills up his silo

for the winter.

I lay my hand

on your chest:

Whoever asserts his life

declares it to be true

I recently read in the train.

Once again, Merz re-creates the subtle interplay between outer and inner worlds that takes place in our bodies and minds as we live from moment to moment and sometimes, in fact rarely, feel ourselves living. Indeed, these poems often seem to indicate, even signify, that the poet narrator is becoming more vividly conscious of his own processes of feeling and thinking and perceiving. These self-reflexive states of consciousness, or “apperceptions” (as they were called by Kant, Leibniz, and Maine de Biran), reveal aliveness. That is, when we sense ourselves caught up in the very processes of feeling or thinking or perceiving, we sense our aliveness as undeniably tangible, if rather eerie. And just as soon, the sensation vanishes.

Moreover, with verse reduced to such rhetorical directness, yet remaining so semantically suggestive, it is not surprising that Merz also sometimes meditates on the very act of writing. In these poems, like the love poems, one finds the same search for the source; that is, for the fundamental right word, for the clearest and yet most meaningful formulation of a feeling, thought, or perception. As with his love poetry, Merz draws back the curtain on unostentatious yet no less mysterious vistas:

In the evening

to iustifv the

with a single sentence.

With a word.

With the letter

“A.”

What lies behind this letter “A”?

These reflections on writing notwithstanding, Merz especially engages with the more subdued, yet telltale, forms of inner commotion. Time and again he comes back to what binds us to each other or to what can unbind us. This is why his poems about poetry rarely dwell on the issue of poetry per se, but rather return, implicitly, to the questions of how we live (and love) or how we could or should live (and love). Certain fundamental dichotomies spark these essential questions over and again. For example, the mere six lines of “Poems” defines Merz’s darkness-to-light poetics:

On my writing desk

debris pile up.

Blackthorn breaks

through the rubble.

Through dark names

I speak of light.

Similarly, his poems sometimes grapple with persistent fear and the prospect of liberating himself from it. His poem “Outlook” predicts a day when “it will be bright and May.” An auspicious perspective, so it seems. And yet, avows the poet,

well-being will seize me

already I am afraid

not to be up to it.

I will long keep walking

comfortable room

grasp the bars in front of the window

as if they were violin strings

and be frightened

by my song.

This question of fear is related to another major theme in Merz’s work: the constant presence, in his mind, of the death of a brother. His poem “My Brother Martin” emphasizes the recurrent perturbing nature of this death:

At n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 On the Strassenbahn with Klaus Merz’s Poetry
• 2 Friedrich Hölderlin, Our Contemporary
• 3 German Poetry beyond Rilke, Benn, and Brecht
• 4 The Unexpected Compassion of Gottfried Benn
• 5 Reading Contemporary Poetry in Weimar
• 6 Translating Swiss Poetry in Looren
• 7 The Italian Poets are Coming!
• 8 Meeting up with Lorenzo Calogero in Florence
• 9 “Guardami, dimmi, è così per te”: Alfredo de Palchi
• 10 Sandro Penna’s Secret Poems
• 11 The Dark of Love: Patrizia Cavalli
• 12 Poetic Ljubljana
• 13 Edvard Kocbek, Emmanuel Mounier, the French Review Esprit, and Personalism
• 14 Questions of Daily Life and Beyond: Milan Djordjević
• 15 The Tiger is the World: Tomislav Marijan Bilosnić
• 16 The Unshackling of Albanian Poetry
• 17 Standing by Pointlessness: Kiki Dimoula
• 18 Manolis Xexakis’s Captain Super Priovolos: Notes for an Exegesis
• 19 A Panorama of Turkish Love Poetry: Birhan Keskin and Other Contemporary Women Poets
• 20 The Seventh Gesture: Tsvetanka Elenkova
• 21 The Wonder-like Lightning of Prose Poetry
• 22 Love According to Luca
• 23 Discovering Benjamin Fondane
• 24 The Desire to Affirm: George Szirtes
• 25 Prague as a Poem: Vítězslav Nezval and Emil Hakl
• 26 A Rather Late Letter from Wrocław
• 27 The Self and Its Selves: A Journey through Poetic Northern Climes
• 28 The Russian Poets Are Coming!
• 29 The Five Angles of the Golden Rectangle: Tomas Venclova
• 30 Telling Dichotomies: María do Cebreiro and Kristiina Ehin
• 31 The Metaphysics of the Kiss: Vicente Aleixandre
• 32 A Spanish Metaphysical Poet Searching for Songs of Truth: José Ángel Valente
• 33 The Passion and the Patience of Eugénio de Andrade
• 34 The Past Hour, the Present Hour: Yves Bonnefoy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index